Shares of Time Warner Inc., the world's largest media company, rose as much as 2.4 percent after the New York Post said the company is in talks to sell a stake in America Online to Microsoft Corp.

Microsoft, the world's biggest software company, would pay New York-based Time Warner an unspecified amount of cash for a stake in AOL and combine it with its Internet unit, MSN, the newspaper said, citing two unidentified people familiar with the situation.

Currently Google powers AOL search and provides AdWords ads to AOL.com. Google's stock is only down a few points on a day with their secondary public offering and this story spreading. I can't explain why the stock is not dropping further.

MSFT might be spending some of their 37 billion to buy the pieces they need to be a search contender. LookSmart's stock has been inching upward all month long as well.

With Ask developing their own in house ad sales network and MSN potentially gobbling up AOL it looks like Google may end up losing a huge amount of their ad syndication. Lucky for Google they have built Google.com into such a large destination site. In The Search John Battelle mentioned the biggest problem with the Overture business model was their heavy reliance upon partners.

Talks are most advanced with Microsoft â€” Time Warner management's preferred partner â€” but the media giant has also had discussions with both Yahoo! and Google over a sale or venture with AOL, according to a source close to Time Warner.

Google approached Comcast about participating in a bid for AOL last week, according to a person familiar with the matter. But Google may end up making a bid on its own, another person said.

The deal would put a value on AOL, as a whole, of about $20 billion, the people said. Any bid would be worth considerably less, however, as AOL's dial-up operations generate lots of cash and would account for much of its value.

With Google, there are rumors about them being interested in that services piece, but they really haven't done that much. Our search API is way better than their search API. Clearly, they are working in that area. They haven't done as much on the server piece.

MSN Search API - perhaps it is time for me to see if Mike can update Hub Finder & Link Harvester to include MSN Search.

MSN AdCenter review - sounds cool. Am also interested in seeing how their launch will effect the feature sets at other engines, and how the eventual shift and Yahoo! factoring in CTR into cost per click will effect YHOO in the stock market. Google is nearing double the value of Yahoo!, partially because their ad market is so much more efficient than Yahoo!'s.

I mentioned this to Kali tonight and he brought up a bit about genetic algorithms and how some older algorithms suffer at finding the optimal points on relevancy curves because the improved relevancy might not be easy to reach since some of the algorithm get stuck on smaller peaks.

LookSmart is taking the bold step of private-labeling Furl.net for publishers within its strategy of licensing tools, content and technology so they can own search advertiser relationships, develop a larger search audience and retain their audience more effectively with sticky tools like Furl.

I think LookSmart needs to get in check with reality a bit. I mean, why should I trust their network when they use AdSense instead of LookSmart on some of their own sites. To me that just goes to show that the value of their ad network has eroded to next to nothing.

Google AdSense:Publisher Conference, reviewed. They highlighted a few sites and I think I know some of the people who may do some of the ads for some of them.

When my friend initially set up his personals page on AOL a long time ago (before he knew what a landing page was) he got so many leads that he was sending girls to his friends. Unfortunatly, I was not a friend of his at the time :(